For a while, just after the first drinks break of the fourth day at Edgbaston, the cricket was not sport but a hypnotic vortex. Deeper and deeper it went, nowhere but actually everywhere and anyway what did it matter where it went because it was impossible not to be transfixed by it.
At one end Rahat Ali was sparring with Joe Root and at the other Yasir Shah with James Vince. If ever a fast bowler and a legspinner can be said to play to established stereotypes – and it cannot really – then here those were reversed. The legspinner, not the paceman, was the one trying to bulldoze a way through – in this case, Yasir unsubtly through to Vince’s pads.
Rahat was the one in the midst of laying a trap, piece by meticulous piece. Full and outside off, often far outside, then recalibrating closer, then going further again; with Root’s outside edge it was as playful and flirtatious as the beginnings of a courtship.
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Twenty-eight balls, every single one of them a dot. Yasir slipped first, allowing Vince some runs. But in the next over Rahat bowled four more dot balls at Root, the atmosphere stretched out taut over the occasion. It would have to snap surely.
It did. Root broke. So inconspicuously good, Root had earlier played out some mighty fine outswingers from Sohail Khan as if they were beach balls lazily drifting towards him. With Rahat, the angle did for him, a little movement away catching his edge. At first slip Mohammad Hafeez dropped it. At first slip Mohammad Hafeez, it has been clear for a while, should not be standing.
Still it was a symphony, its intentions undone by that bum note to end, but not really its quality and the unmistakable orchestrator was Misbah-ul-Haq. Who else could it be?
On air, almost none of the broadcast commentators could get their heads round tactics they found to be distastefully defensive – especially Rahat’s. England were two down and not many ahead so why were Pakistan and Rahat not attacking the stumps more? Why were there not more catchers and not fielders? Why was there a deep point?
Only Nasser Hussain understood not only what was happening but its strategic nuances and that should be no surprise – Hussain and Misbah both began their captaincy in deflated, defeated and broken sides, neither with any great resources at their disposal. In both, pragmatism was the response to all problems.
So what Misbah was doing is what Misbah has always done: dry up the game. Misbah never wants to give away runs. If you gave him enough time he could probably work out a way to stop leaking runs in book cricket. Deny modern batsmen easy boundaries especially, Misbah’s thinking goes, is to inject in them a degree of hypochondria. They begin to imagine themselves batting ailments of all sorts.
In addition, the first instinct after the ground Pakistan ceded on the third afternoon must have been to try and secure a foothold back in the game and to insert into the equation the possibility of a draw. Manoeuvring a draw is an underappreciated, perhaps dying skill, and for two-thirds of the day Misbah did it brilliantly, with the care and precision of a surgeon.
Each time his side took a wicket, he had to make sure that in the search for a win Pakistan did not stray too far from the safe island of a draw. And why not? Just because Pakistan have a shot at getting to No 1 in the ICC rankings does not make them the best side in the world, not when they are so untested outside Asia (see Australia, currently top, eight consecutive defeats in Asia behind them). Increasingly in the post-South Africa era, the ranking methodology feels misleading and inadequate – there is no best side really. More than anyone, Misbah knows his team. He knows the capabilities of his batsmen, that capacity for implosion and the unfamiliarity to such conditions. It is that he had to account for.
The error is to think of Misbah’s tactics as a purely defensive ploy. They were not. It is a form of attack just through defence. It could be argued that in using Mohammad Amir – a bowler with inherent and more outright attacking instincts – to these ends is overdoing it, maybe even a misdirection of his talents. But there is something to be admired in that too, both in his ensuring that Amir is doing so and in Amir’s execution of it.
And if the instinct is to grumble, then remember that this series, on Saturday, stood level with potentially six days to go – if you had given that to Pakistan at the start of the tour they would have taken it.
The undoing of Misbah and Pakistan’s plans was, ultimately, the four-man attack.
With two spinners on UAE surfaces, it works. But with three pacemen at the end of a long, intense day, they were bound to flag and here there was no respite.
England’s batting depth is almost perfectly engineered to take advantage of just such compositions.
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